Author: geraldgreene

Nina Pham has received unwanted international attention as the nurse in Dallas who became infected with the Ebola virus while treating a highly infectious patient.

The CDC and hospital employing Nina are unsure how she contracted the disease.She was wearing full protective PPE gear and still became infected. Perhaps following the time tested protocol used by the Ebola treatment experienced Doctors Without Borders would have protected Nina. We’ll never know.

Nina is like many nurses in the US. Nurses are dedicated people who deserve a lot of respect. Night and day they work hard to give the best of care for patients. Most are positive people who make being a patient more bearable. According to friends and co-workers Nina is one of the best.

Young Nurses at Work

It’s heartbreaking to see Nina Pham infected with Ebola. I don’t know Nina, but still shed tears for her. Hopefully our health care system is up to the challenge and she’ll overcome the disease.

Nina’s sad plight brings home one fact. The US and the world are not ready for an Ebola outbreak. Governments around the world must make stopping this Ebola outbreak priority number one.

More than a nurse: Who is Ebola patient Nina Pham?

By Holly Yan, CNN

She tackled one of the toughest jobs any nurse could take on — treating a highly contagious Ebola patient. And somehow along the way, she contracted the deadly virus herself.
Now, as Nina Pham tries to recover in the same hospital where she works, details of her life and career are beginning to emerge.

Here’s what we know about the 26-year-old Texan:

She’s Vietnamese-American

Nurse is first to contract Ebola in U.S. Neighbors of nurse with Ebola concerned Ebola patient given blood from survivor
Pham grew up in a Vietnamese family in Fort Worth, Texas.
She didn’t go far away for college, attending Texas Christian University in the same city. Pham graduated with a nursing license in 2010.

And just two months ago, she received certification in critical care nursing, which deals specifically with life-threatening problems.

She’s very religious

“She is a very devoted Catholic, and always puts the other people’s interests ahead of her own,” said family friend Tom Ha, who has known Pham since she was in 8th grade.
Ha taught Pham in Bible class at his church.

“She comes from a family that is (of) a very strong faith,” he said. So he wasn’t surprised “that she (did) more than her duty called for in order to make sure the patient had a chance to survive.”

When Pham called the church to let members know she contracted Ebola, “everybody at the church” began crying, he said.
How did she contract Ebola?

She loves her job

Ha, the family friend, said nursing isn’t just a job for Pham — it’s a calling.
“I think that she takes it (as) more than a career. I think it’s a vocation, because her family, from the time that we met, they always serve other people,” he said.
When she was accepted into nursing school, she was really excited, a family friend told the Dallas Morning News.
“Her mom would tell her how it’s really hard and a bunch of her friends quit doing it because it was so stressful,” the friend told the paper. “But she was like, ‘This is what I want to do.'”
What’s a hospital supposed to do if an Ebola patient shows up?

She’s a good teacher

Not only is Pham skilled in proper nursing techniques, she was a scrupulous teacher, too.
Jennifer Joseph trained under Pham at Texas Health Presbyterian Hospital in Dallas. Though she now works at another hospital, she remembers the guidance she received from Pham.

“Knowing Nina, she’s one of the most meticulous, thorough, effective nurses,” Joseph told CNN affiliate KTVT. “She taught me infection control and hand hygiene and protocol. I learned so much of that from her.”

Joseph said she also has faith those taking care of her now will help their colleague recover.
“I have full confidence they’ll be able to get her through this.”

Good News: After being treated at NHI Nina Pham is now virus free. We are truly happy to see this couragous nurse beat the Ebola virus.

Did you like reading our collection on Ebola virus? We update new information on Ebola virus weekly. We would like to see you back on our website to enjoy more valuable reading. There is a lot we still have to cover in this fast tragic moving story.

We’re told by the CDC we have nothing to fear. In the US Ebola will be contained. This statement was made at a CDC press conference one day before the nurse in Dallas was confirmed to have Ebola. And she reportedly was following CDC protocol designed to prevent contagion. Bad timing by the CDC, who in my opinion, is over confident in US preparedness for an Ebola outbreak.

Doctors Without Borders has been active in Africa for years treating Ebola patients. Their protocol has been effective. Not one DWB health worker has become infected with Ebola. Perhaps our CDC should follow their protocol, not blame a nurse for a breach of theirs. The US is NOT prepared for an Ebola pandemic.

The following article was written by an author who has been right with many forecasts. He’s a smart guy. His view of what could happen with an Ebola epidemic is grim. Hopefully, Dmity Orlov is wrong. Read it and other works by Orlov and you decide. Links to his website are at the end of this article.

Ebola and the Five Stages of Collapse

By Dmitry Orlov

At the moment, the Ebola virus is ravaging three countries—Liberia, Guinea and Sierra Leone—where it is doubling every few weeks, but singular cases and clusters of them are cropping up in dense population centers across the world. An entirely separate Ebola outbreak in the Congo appears to be contained, but illustrates an important point: even if the current outbreak (to which some are already referring as a pandemic) is brought under control, continuing deforestation and natural habitat destruction in the areas where the fruit bats that carry the virus live make future outbreaks quite likely.

Ebola’s mortality rate can be as high as 70%, but seems closer to 50% for the current major outbreak.

This is significantly worse than the Bubonic plague, which killed off a third of Europe’s population. Previous Ebola outbreaks occurred in rural, isolated locales, where they quickly burned themselves out by infecting everyone within a certain radius, then running out of new victims. But the current outbreak has spread to large population centers with highly mobile populations, and the chances of such a spontaneous end to this outbreak seem to be pretty much nil.

Ebola has an incubation period of some three weeks during which patients remain asymptomatic and, specialists assure us, noninfectious. However, it is known that some patients remain asymptomatic throughout, in spite of having a strong inflammatory response, and can infect others. Nevertheless, we are told that those who do not present symptoms of Ebola—such as high fever, nausea, fatigue, bloody stool, bloody vomit, nose bleeds and other signs of hemorrhage—cannot infect others.

We are also told that Ebola can only be spread through direct contact with the bodily fluids of an infected individual, but it is known that among pigs and monkeys Ebola can be spread through the air, and the possibility of catching it via a cough, a sneeze, a handrail or a toilet seat is impossible to discount entirely.

It is notable that many of the medical staff who became infected did so in spite of wearing protective gear—face masks, gloves, goggles and body suits. In short, nothing will guarantee your survival short of donning a space suit or relocating to a space station.

There is a test that shows whether someone is infected with Ebola, but it is known to produce false negatives. Other methods do even worse. Current effort at “enhanced screening,” recently introduced at a handful of international airports, where passengers arriving from the affected countries are now being checked for fever, fatigue and nausea, are unlikely to stop infected, and infectious, individuals. They are akin to other “security theater” methods that are currently in vogue, such as making passengers take off their shoes and testing breast milk for its potential as an explosive.

The fact that the thermometers, which agents point at people’s heads, are made to look like guns is a nice little touch; whoever came up with that idea deserves Homeland Security’s highest decoration—to be shaped like a bomb and worn rectally.

It is unclear what technique or combination of techniques could guarantee that Ebola would not spread. Even a month-long group quarantine for all travelers from all of the affected countries may provide the virus with a transmission path via asymptomatic, undiagnosed individuals. And even a quarantine that would amount to solitary confinement (which would be both impractical and illegal) would simply put evolutionary pressure on this fast-mutating virus to adapt and incubate longer than the period of the quarantine.

Treatment of Ebola victims amounts to hydration and palliative care. Transfusions of blood donated by a survivor seem to be the only effective therapy available. An experimental drug called ZMapp has been demonstrated to stop Ebola in non-human primates, but its effectiveness in humans is now known to be less than 100%. It is an experimental drug, made in small batches by infecting young tobacco plants with an eyedropper.

Even if its production is scaled up, it will be too little and too late to have any measurable effect on the current epidemic. Likewise, experimental Ebola vaccines have been demonstrated to be effective in animal trials, and one has been shown to be safe in humans, but the process of demonstrating it effectiveness in humans and then producing it in sufficient quantities may take longer than it would for the virus to spread around the world.

The scenario in which Ebola engulfs the globe is not yet guaranteed, but neither can it be dismissed as some sort of apocalyptic fantasy: the chances of it happening are by no means zero. And if Ebola is not stopped, it has the potential to reduce the human population of the earth from over 7 billion to around 3.5 billion in a relatively short period of time. Note that even a population collapse of this magnitude is still well short of causing human extinction: after all, about half the victims fully recover and become immune to the virus. But supposing that Ebola does run its course, what sort of world will it leave in its wake?

More importantly, now is a really good time to start thinking of ways in which people can adapt to the reality of a global Ebola pandemic, to avoid a wide variety of worst-case outcomes. After all, compared to some other doomsday scenarios, such as runaway climate change or global nuclear annihilation, a population collapse can look positively benign, and, given the completely unsustainable impact humans are currently having on the environment, may perhaps even come to be regarded as beneficial.

I understand that such thinking is anathema to those who feel that every problem must have a solution—or it’s not worth discussing. I certainly don’t want to discourage those who are trying to stop Ebola, or to delay its spread until a vaccine becomes available, and would even help them if I could. I am not suicidal, and I don’t look forward to the death of roughly half the people I know. But I happen to disagree that thinking about what such an outcome, and perhaps even preparing for it in some ways, is necessarily a bad idea. Unless, of course, it produces a panic. So, if you are prone to panic, perhaps you shouldn’t be reading this.

And so, for the benefit of those who are not particularly panic-prone, I am going to trot out my old technique of examining collapse as consisting of five distinct stages: financial, commercial, political, social and cultural, and briefly discuss the various ramifications of a swift 50% global population collapse when viewed through that prism. If you want to know all about the five stages, my book is widely available.

Financial collapse

Our current set of financial arrangements, involving very large levels of debt leading to artificially high valuations placed on stocks, commodities, real estate, and Ph.D’s in economics, is underpinned by a key assumption: that the global economy is going to continue to grow. Yes, global growth started stumbling around the turn of the century, stopped for a while during the financial collapse of 2008, and has since then remained anemic, with even the most tentative signs of recovery having much to do with unlimited money-printing by the world’s central banks, but the economics Ph.D’s remain ever so hopeful that growth will resume. Nevertheless, this much is clear: halving the number of workers and consumers would not be conducive to boosting economic growth.

Quite the opposite: it would mean that most debt will have to be written off. Likewise, the valuations of companies that would supply half the demand with half the workers would be unlikely to go up. Nor would the houses, half of which would stand vacant and dilapidated, increase in value. If the supply of oil suddenly outstrips demand by 50%, then this would cause the price of oil to drop to a point where it no longer covers the cost of producing it, and oil producers will be forced to shut down.

This would not be a happy event for those countries that are heavily dependent on energy exports in order to afford imports of food to feed their populations. Nor would such developments spell a happy end for those countries that need to continuously roll over trillions of dollars of short-term debt in order to continue feeding their populations via government hand-outs (the United States comes to mind).

“But what about wealth preservation?!” I hear some of my readers screaming in anguish? “How do I hedge my portfolio against a sudden 50% global population drop?” Well, that’s easy: you need to be short all paper. Short it all: currency, stocks, bonds, debt instruments, deeds on urban real estate. Get out of most commodities: energy, obviously, but also precious metals, because you can’t eat gold. Go long people (who will be in ever-shorter supply) and arable land (because people have to eat) and stockpile everything else that they will need to learn to feed themselves.

If they are sufficiently grateful for all your help, they will feed you too. Alternatively, you can just sit on your paper wealth as it dwindles to nothing, and wait for the torches and the pitchforks to come out. Since wealthy people squander a disproportionate amount of wealth on themselves and their families, killing them off is a good wealth preservation strategy—for the rest of us, so feel free to do your part.

Ebola virus is a favorite search over most search engines today. At our website, we tried to gather the best pieces of information for you. In case you liked the article above, we would recommend you to browse through our article gallery for more valuable take-away on the subject matter. Please remember the articles we present are collated from mainstream websites. Hopefully, MSM is reporting accurate information as known today.

There are over 5,000 hospitals in the US. Nurses are screaming that they’re not prepared for an Ebola outbreak. Events in Dallas back up their position. Fact. We’ve never faced anything like Ebola.

Who’s in Charge of Ebola at Hospitals? ‘Screaming That We’re Not Prepared’

By Robert Langreth, Caroline Chen and Margaret Newkirk

Hospital staff need better training, more funding and sharper oversight to handle Ebola patients, nurses and doctors said after a caregiver in Dallas was confirmed to have caught the deadly virus.

The unidentified worker, who cared for Ebola patient Thomas Eric Duncan at Texas Health Presbyterian Hospital, was infected after a “breach in protocol,” said Thomas Frieden, director of the U.S. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention. It’s the first time someone has contracted Ebola inside U.S. borders.

Even as the CDC has hastened to reassure the public that the virus won’t spread in the U.S., the agency doesn’t monitor hospitals and has no authority to make sure they comply with official guidelines, according to Abbigail Tumpey, a CDC spokeswoman who is leading the education outreach to hospitals.

“There are 5,000 hospitals in the U.S. and I would say probably the number of them that have actually done drills or put plans in place is small,” she said.

It’s up to each hospital to enforce infection control, and standards vary depending on funding for infection experts and time devoted to training.

“We have been screaming for the past three months that hospitals are not prepared,” said Deborah Burger, co-president of National Nurses United, which represents 185,000 nurses across the country.

The American Hospital Association was instructing its members “to meet the latest CDC guidance and best practices to protect health care workers,” Ken Anderson, chief operating officer of the AHA’s research and educational trust, said in a statement.

“The CDC is investigating how to improve these plans and processes so all hospitals can learn from what has happened in Dallas,” Anderson said. “These are complex systems and procedures. We urge hospitals to review and update them as appropriate for their community.”

Following the guidelines for protective gear is easier said than done, according to Eli Perencevich, professor of epidemiology at the University of Iowa Carver College of Medicine.

Full protection against Ebola involves special gowns, gloves, a face shield and a mask, and putting on and taking off the various parts is “a slow, deliberate process with lots of steps” which takes about six minutes each way, Perencevich said in a telephone interview.

Ebola Training Gap

“The thing that’s most concerning is that people just don’t have experience with this and they may accidentally put a dirty glove to their face or touch something with their hands, and eventually the hand goes to the mouth,” he said.

The CDC has told Texas Health Presbyterian Hospital to assign someone whose sole job is to make sure Ebola caregivers follow protocol, Frieden said yesterday. Doctors Without Borders, the medical aid agency at the outbreak’s front lines in West Africa, uses a “buddy system,” where health workers watch each other dress and undress to make sure there are no slips.

The only way to ensure hospital workers correctly follow procedure is with training and drills, Perencevich said. Some caregivers feel they aren’t adequately prepared.

About 85 percent of nurses haven’t received interactive education on how to take care of Ebola patients, according to the association’s survey of 1,900 nurses in the past few weeks, and 76 percent of the nurses surveyed said their hospital hasn’t communicated any policy on potential admission of patients with Ebola.

Heads in the Sand

Hospital administrators “are like ostriches with their heads in the sand, they keep telling our nurses there is a plan and the nurses say there is no plan,” Burger said in a telephone interview.

Many nurses have been directed to look up the recommendations on the CDC website or they are handed one sheet of paper and given a kit with Ebola equipment in it, but they haven’t received training on how to use it, Burger said.

Funding is another obstacle, as budget cuts are hurting hospitals’ ability to hire experts and equipment, according to some physicians.

“Infection control budgets have been slashed,” said Judy Stone, an infectious disease expert who works at various hospitals in Pennsylvania.

At one hospital she visited, she was alarmed that each room didn’t have its own stethoscope, which meant physicians could be carrying drug-resistant bacteria from room to room. When Stone protested, she was told there wasn’t enough funding to buy more stethoscopes.

Better Training

Health workers should be training with products like Glo Germ, which can only be seen under black light, Stone said. The substance can be spread over surfaces like bed rails, then workers can see where they’ve picked it up and how they could have potentially been contaminated.

The government doesn’t require hospitals to have infection control specialists, and Medicare, the federal insurance program for the elderly, doesn’t reimburse hospitals for hiring such staff, which are essential to training and enforcing standards, said Perencevich of the University of Iowa.

“We pay for procedures — we give hospitals a lot of money for bypass surgery, but no money to prevent a surgical infection,” he said. “Every dollar the CEO spends on infection control must come out of the budget.”

Better Hospitals

Until hospitals can demonstrate they are adequately prepared, patients may need to be transferred to other institutions that have demonstrated competency, say some physicians.

Ebola “isn’t pixie dust, it doesn’t just jump from one place to another,” said Michael Osterholm, director of the Center for Infectious Disease Research and Policy at the University of Minnesota.

The newly infected health worker “begs the question of whether there should be a limited number of hospitals caring for these patients,” he said.

The CDC doesn’t have the authority to determine whether hospitals are qualified or not, Tumpey, the agency spokeswoman, said. “Sometimes moving patients is not possible if they are too ill,” she said in an e-mail. “We are looking into this issue further.”

Asked in a conference call yesterday if the Dallas health worker might be moved, CDC director Frieden said the agency is exploring all options.

For now, it may be up to individual hospitals to ask for help.

“Any hospital of any size needs to be prepared,” said Phil Smith, medical director of the biocontainment unit at the Nebraska Medical Center in Omaha, which has treated a U.S. Missionary worker and television cameraman infected with the virus in West Africa. More Americans infected with Ebola are likely to be repatriated, he said. “It looks like this is something that’s going to be going on for a long time.”

Did you like reading our collection on Ebola virus? We update new information on Ebola virus weekly. We would like to see you back on our website to enjoy more valuable reading. There is a lot we still have to cover on this fast moving story.

The CDC claims a breach of protocol was responsible for a nurse in Dallas being infected with the Ebola virus. She was treating the man who died of Ebola. Let’s hope the CDC is correct and following the existing protocol exactly will prevent infection. But it’s possible the nurse followed protocol, but for Ebola the protocol needs to be reexamined.

If it was a breach of existing protocol the hospital and CDC may still be responsible. Apparently, the use of a supervisor or buddy system was not in the protocol. Doctors Without Borders always require someone watches every move a health worker makes when treating a patient infected with Ebola. Ebola is unforgiving. Any mistakes can lead to infection. A well trained supervisor can catch mistakes and require immediate decontamination.

How Many Duncan Caregivers Are at Risk? ‘Breach of Protocol’

The U.S. health worker who contracted Ebola after being in contact with an infected patient in Dallas is leading officials to examine how widespread the danger is for those who cared for him.

The unidentified employee at Texas Health Presbyterian Hospital wasn’t among the 48 people who were being watched because they may have been in contact with the patient before he was placed in isolation, said Thomas Frieden, director of the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention. Under the safety procedures in place, the caregivers were monitoring their own health.

“At some point there was a breach in protocol,” Frieden said at a press conference in Atlanta yesterday. “It is possible that other individuals were exposed.”

It’s the first time someone is known to have contracted Ebola inside U.S. borders, and only the second known case of an infection outside Africa. The diagnosis adds pressure on the U.S. government to tighten controls aimed at stemming the spread of the virus that’s killed more than 4,000 people this year in three African nations.

The Ebola Scourge

The health worker had been in contact with the patient, Thomas Eric Duncan, on multiple occasions, Frieden said.

The medical team members who helped care for Duncan once he was isolated at the hospital were responsible for monitoring their own conditions because they were considered to be at low risk, Frieden said. The infected worker noticed she had a fever, notified the hospital and was admitted on Oct. 10, Texas Health Presbyterian said in a statement. Her Ebola was confirmed by the Atlanta-based CDC yesterday.

CDC Investigates

The CDC will investigate how the lapse occurred while increasing training and safety procedures, Frieden said. Duncan died Oct. 8. He arrived from Liberia, one of the African nations being ravaged by Ebola, on Sept. 20 and didn’t begin showing signs of the disease until Sept. 24.

The infected worker, who has asked to remain anonymous, was involved in Duncan’s second visit to the hospital, said Dan Varga, chief clinical officer at Texas Health Presbyterian. The worker was wearing full protective gear, Varga said.

Protective gear doesn’t guarantee that an infection won’t occur, said Ashish Jha, professor of health policy at Harvard’s Public School of Health in Boston, in a telephone interview.

“The hard part is during the disrobing, when you take the suit off,” he said. “You’re removing material, getting skin exposed.”

Not Easy

The removal of the worker’s gear is one area being examined, Frieden said. “It’s not an easy thing to do right.”

Two other areas where the breach may have occurred are the respiratory intubation of Duncan and his kidney dialysis, Frieden said.

“Even a single inadvertent slip can result in contamination,” he said.

Health officials are assessing people the caregiver had contact with since she developed symptoms, and there has only been one who may have been with her while she could be contagious, Frieden said. That person is now under monitoring.

“We are broadening our team in Dallas and working with extreme diligence to prevent further spread,” David Lakey, commissioner of the Texas Department of State Health Services, said in a statement. The CDC has sent extra workers to help.

Ebola virus is a favorite search over most search engines today. At our website, we tried to gather the best pieces of information for you. In case you liked the article above, we would recommend you to browse through our article gallery for more valuable takeaways on the subject matter. Please remember the articles we present are collated from mainstream websites. Hopefully, MSM is reporting accurate information as known today.

Who would you rather have as your leader? Barack Obama or Vladimir Putin?

Love him or hate him President Obama rose to power at an early age. With his background it really was an amazing accomplishment. How did he do it? One can only wonder what promises were made. And to whom? Who really pulls the strings?

President Obama apparently doesn’t enjoy the confidence of the majority of Americans. The Rasmussen Reports daily Presidential Tracking Poll for Sunday. Oct 12, 2014 shows that 47% of likely U.S. Voters approve of President Obama’s job performance. Fifty-one percent (51%) disapprove. Some polls show even weaker approval numbers. Obama doesn’t seem to care. He shows an arrogance that is troubling to this former supporter. For example, he thinks acting as judge, jury, and executioner with drone strikes against anyone,anywhere in the world is Ok. Maybe I’m old fashioned, but that seems to be too much power in the hands of any one individual. It’s a policy that is generating blowback that will haunt Americans for years.

The question remains. Who pulls Obama’s strings? And Who Pulls Putin’s?

According to Wikipedia, Vladimir Putin for 16 years served as an officer in the KGB, rising to the rank of Lieutenant Colonel before he retired to enter politics in his native Saint Petersburg in 1991. He moved to Moscow in 1996 and joined President Boris Yeltsin’s administration where he rose quickly, becoming Acting President on 31 December 1999 when Yeltsin unexpectedly resigned.

Putin won the subsequent 2000 presidential election and was reelected in 2004. Because of constitutionally mandated term limits, Putin was ineligible to run for a third consecutive presidential term in 2008. Dmitry Medvedev won the 2008 presidential election and appointed Putin as Prime Minister, beginning a period of so-called “tandemocracy“.

In September 2011, following a change in the law extending the presidential term from four years to six,Putin announced that he would seek a third, non-consecutive term as President in the 2012 presidential election, an announcement which led to large-scale protests in many Russian cities. He won the election in March 2012 and is serving a six-year term.

Now, after flexing Russian muscle, the Russia people seem to love President Putin. He has an approval rating of over 80%. Standing up to western nations seems to have a lot to do with his rating. The big question is if he has the judgement to avoid an ongoing conflict. No doubt another cold war is on. Is Putin his own man, or does even he have someone or some group pulling strings? What do you think?

BookBub Helps Authors Sell Books.

BookBub has a lot of appeal to book lovers. That includes authors who are eager to promote their book using BookBub. Editors at Bookbub only accept 20% of books authors wish to promote. Perhaps that’s why they have so many followers among rabid readers.

Book Lovers Are Totally Obsessed With This Website

March 9, 2014 by The Book Insider

Last year, Random House quietly gave away Dan Brown’s bestselling novel, The Da Vinci Code, for free for one week. Millions of readers were unaware of the week-long giveaway.
A select group of readers did take advantage of the promotion, though. They were using BookBub, a daily email that alerts readers to free and deeply discounted ebooks that are available for a limited time. BookBub notified nearly 1 million readers of the free Da Vinci Code deal last spring.

“It’s the Groupon of books,” Dominique Raccah, the publisher of Sourcebooks, told The New York Times about deal sites like BookBub. “For the consumer, it’s new, it’s interesting. It’s a deal and there isn’t much risk. And it works.”

Why did Random House give away a bestselling ebook that usually retails for $9.99? The company’s goal was to hook new readers on Brown’s thrillers and drum up interest in his new book, Inferno. The free ebook even included the prologue and first chapter of Inferno.

“It makes it almost irresistible,” Liz Perl, Simon & Schuster’s senior vice president explained to the The New York Times. “We’re lowering the bar for you to sample somebody new.”
Book lovers have now become practically obsessed with BookBub. In many cases, they’ve downloaded hundreds of books that publishers and authors have promoted on the site.

“I now have more books than I can read in a lifetime,” said Suzie Miller of Auburn, Wash. She said she has downloaded more than 350 free books using the service.

For readers, part of the appeal of BookBub is that it does not list every single free ebook on the market. Instead, BookBub’s expert editorial team selectively curates only the highest-quality ebooks to feature in their email and on their website.

In most cases, the deals can be purchased for any ereading device, including Kindle, iPad, Nook, and Android.
Readers can select which genres they would like to receive, so each email is matched to their preferences. BookBub features more than two dozen genres of books, including mystery, romance, literary, historical fiction, nonfiction and more.

With millions of readers using BookBub’s service, this type of promotional concept seems to be resonating with both publishers and readers alike. To find out more about the service, go to www.bookbub.com.

How does a hospital worker following the full protocol for treating infected people catch Ebola? The CDC and government officials say there’s nothing to worry about, right? Could it be in an effort to prevent panic the CDC and government spin and PR guys are working overtime to feed the public misinformation?

Dallas Hospital Worker Diagnosed With Ebola, First to Catch Deadly Virus in U.S. By David Wainer

An employee at Texas Health Presbyterian Hospital who provided care for the Ebola patient hospitalized there has been diagnosed with the virus, raising concerns that the disease could spread.

The patient, who was not identified, tested positive for Ebola in a preliminary test at the state public health laboratory in Austin, Texas, and a second analysis will be conducted by the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention in Atlanta, the Texas Department of State Health Services said on its website today.

“We knew a second case could be a reality, and we’ve been preparing for this possibility,” David Lakey, commissioner of the department, said in the statement. “We are broadening our team in Dallas and working with extreme diligence to prevent further spread.”

The diagnosis marks the first time someone contracted Ebola inside U.S. borders and adds pressure on the government to tighten controls as it seeks to stem the spread of the virus that’s killed more than 4,000 people this year in three African nations. John F. Kennedy International Airport began added screening for arriving passengers yesterday, just three days after the first U.S. death caused by Ebola.

That patient, Thomas Eric Duncan, arrived from Liberia on Sept. 20 and didn’t begin showing signs of the disease until Sept. 24.

Ebola: Tracing Contacts

The infected worker was wearing protective gear and was following the full protocol for treating infected people, hospital officials said at a news conference in Dallas today. The patient has asked to remain anonymous, they said.

“Health officials have interviewed the patient and are identifying any contacts or potential exposures,” the Texas health department said in its statement. “People who had contact with the health care worker after symptoms emerged will be monitored based on the nature of their interactions and the potential they were exposed to the virus.”

The Dallas diagnosis is only the second known case of an Ebola infection outside Africa. Teresa Romero, a nursing assistant, is hospitalized in Madrid, where she became infected last month after helping care for two missionaries who had fallen ill in West Africa. Her situation remains stable, Fernando Simon, a health ministry official, said at a news conference. One of 16 people being monitored for Ebola in Madrid was released yesterday, and none of the others are showing symptoms of the virus, officials said.

No Cure

An international effort is under way to control the worst outbreak of Ebola on record, which has infected more than 8,300 people and killed more than 4,000. Liberia, Sierra Leone and Guinea have accounted for most of those cases, threatening to isolate those countries from global markets and sap economic growth in West Africa.

Officials have vowed to stop any spread in the U.S. of the virus, which has no proven cure. Supply of the most promising experimental drug, ZMapp, ran out in August and U.S. officials and researchers are looking at whether new large-scale techniques are possible to increase production of the drug.

Duncan, the first U.S. patient, brought Ebola with him when he traveled from Liberia to Dallas on Sept. 20. Duncan first went to the emergency room at Texas Health Presbyterian Hospital, and was sent home with antibiotics on Sept. 26 after health workers failed to identify him as a potential Ebola case. He returned to the hospital two days later in an ambulance, and was isolated and diagnosed.

Did you like reading our collection on Ebola virus? We update new information on Ebola Virus weekly. We would like to see you back on our website to enjoy more valuable reading. There is a lot we still have to cover in this fast moving and tragic story.